The Continuing Leppertness of Mayor Mike Rawlings

It was a knife in the backs of the students. They thought the city council chamber was the place where this matter would be decided. That's why they were there. They didn't understand that an accommodation had already been reached with the pastor, Stephen Nash, whose church, Mount Tabor Baptist, is right next to their college. Nash rose at the council meeting and spoke in favor of bringing more garbage to his neighborhood. I have attempted to reach Nash about these matters. He did not return my calls.

Rawlings told me later, after I wrote about it, that none of the funds will flow directly to any pastors. Fine. But after hearing exactly the opposite at the meeting where the vote took place, I nevertheless feel confident that somehow, through the elaborately terraced rice paddies of life, water will find its level. Maybe that's just me.

Chris Gash

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More About

• Mike Rawlings
• Michael Sorrell
• Paul Quinn
• Government and Politics
• Local Politics

I have to say that some of the people I talked to at City Hall for this column were in my camp. They agreed with me that Rawlings' personality may be unlike Leppert's — he's much more hail-fellow — but the outcomes are the same. Those outcomes have a lot to do with culture, and for illustration they point to the debate over city council redistricting.

The people who got screwed on the city council redistricting deal that Rawlings hammered out in a last-minute backroom session were the residents of the politically active neighborhoods in North Oak Cliff. Their part of town got chopped up to make for safer districts for incumbents south and east. Those are the only incumbents who need protection. All incumbents in the north are safe, always.

I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings in the North Oak Cliff neighborhoods that got chopped up, but they are referred to behind their backs at City Hall as "The Banshees." Nobody else wants the banshees in their district, at least not all of them, because they do all kinds of stuff that makes trouble. Like voting. They vote way too much. They have these incredibly high voter turnouts when everybody else south of the river has the decency to just let the old people in the nursing homes do the voting.

Neighborhood involvement: always in the way. Citizen activism: Oh, that's a toothache. And they're always innovating, coming up with all these embarrassing ways to make better streets and stuff. Banshees! Trouble.

In the redistricting stuff, the banshees of North Oak Cliff got the same knife in the back that students from Paul Quinn got. The deal was done behind closed doors with Rawlings leading the way, and it was the same old paradigm we have seen for decades in Dallas — the conservative status quo separationists of North Dallas joining hands with the conservative separationists of South Dallas to put the knife in the back of anybody of any ethnicity who wants to change the paradigm.

In this case the people with knives sticking out of their backs were Anglo and Hispanic. In the Paul Quinn case they were young and black. Same paradigm, same knife.

At 10 a.m. Saturday, a very interesting challenge to the old paradigm will take place: a march from Founders Park in Oak Cliff across the river to Ferris Plaza in front of The Dallas Morning News, led by the Paul Quinn students. They say they will be joined by a broad coalition of Latinos, Democrats and some of the city's most influential younger black clergy. I believe a certain number of city council members will take part.

This march will draw a certain line in the sand. Those people including members of the city council who want to give Rawlings the benefit of the doubt will have to make up their minds. How much doubt? How much benefit?

I have spoken to Sorrell about this march at some length. He does not characterize it as a march to confront Rawlings, but he does say it is a march against the old paradigm. The marchers will ask that both backroom deals be undone, the garbage thing and redistricting. They want a new approach in which activist committed citizens are at the table and given respect, not shunted aside and called banshees.

The people who want to give Rawlings more time say that there are outcomes I don't see, things that happen away from the cameras and the hoopla. They tell me it may look to me on the outside that everything has already been precooked but back in the political kitchen where they do the actual cooking, he's a straight-up guy.

Maybe. Or maybe they need to get out of the kitchen.